A Brief Interlude Of Poetic Injustice Before Another Mean Season Begins

TOM KELLY Editorial Writer

March 31, 1995|TOM KELLY

The already devalued 1995 replacement baseball season which is about to begin seems unlikely to inspire either fans or sports writers to any flights of fancy.

Still, times like these cry out for commentary more lyrical than the usual editorial-page prose. I like to think that some immortal American poets might have been moved to put their own distinctive spin on the endless strike.

Unfortunately, none is still among us, but I have taken the liberty of imagining how six of them might have done it:

T.S. Eliot

(The Waste Land)

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Infields out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull rooters with spring optimism.

Who are these owners who grub?

Which replacements will rise

Out of this stony rubbish?

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken idols, where the sun beats

And the empty bleachers give no shelter, Joe Angel no comic relief,

And the dry tap no gurgle of Budweiser.

Robert Frost

(The Gift Outright)

The game was ours before we were the game's.

She was our pastime more than a hundred years

Before we became her bleacher bums. She was ours

In Brooklyn, in the Bronx,

But we were Florida's, still outsiders

Possessing only in springtime what we still were unpossessed by, Possessed by what we now (alas!) no longer possess.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

(Song of a Second April)

April this year, not otherwise

Than April of a year ago,

Is full of threats, full of sighs,

Of lockout talk and strident "No!''

The grand old sport that pleased us so

Is here again, but full of lies.

The talent pool no more is deep,

And hot-dog vendors need not run;

On picket lines, all-stars, like sheep,

Squander their skills in the midday sun.

Disgustedly - only the game is gone,

The game that alone I cared to keep.

Carl Sandburg

(Happiness)

I asked the millionaires who own baseball clubs to tell me what is happiness

And I went to the crafty lawyers who run the union of talented players.

They all shook their heads and gave me a smile as though I was trying to fool with them.

And then one Sunday afternoon I wandered out to Wrigley Field And I saw a crowd of multi-hyphenated Americans in the sunshine with their women and children and their cold beer and Harry Caray singing Take Me Out to the Ballgame.

Walt Whitman

(When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer)

When I heard the learn'd labor negotiator,

When the lawsuits, the injunctions, were ranged in columns before me,

When I was shown the balance sheets and salary caps, to add, divide and measure them,

When I sitting heard the arbitrator where he lectured with much applause in the board-room,